African Americans and the Color Line in Ohio, 1915-1930

Writing in true social history tradition, William W. Giffin presents a magisterial study of African Americans focusing on times that saw the culmination of trends that were fundamentally important in shaping the twentieth century. While many scholars have examined African Americans in the South and such large cities as New York and Chicago during this time, other important urban areas have been ignored. Ohio, with its large but very different urban centers—notably, Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati—provides Giffin with the wealth of statistical data and qualitative material that he uses to argue that the “color line” in Ohio hardened during this time period as the Great Migration gained force. His data show, too, that the color line varied according to urban area—it hardened progressively as one traveled South in the state. In addition, whereas previous studies have concentrated on activism at the national level through such groups as the NAACP, Giffin shows how African American men and women in Ohio constantly negotiated the color line on a local level, through both resistance and accommodation on a daily and very interpersonal level with whites, other blacks, and people of different ethnic, class, and racial backgrounds. This early grassroots resistance provided the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement that would gain momentum some twenty years later. This analysis of the Ohio color line speaks to those historians who still are inclined to discuss Jim Crow as a wholly southern phenomenon. It indicates that the color line in the North was not uniform and provides further evidence of the importance of locale and local people in African American history. At the same time, it offers stories of inherent interest revealing human conduct at its best and worst.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Thanks are owed to those who gave me assistance or support in ways that facilitated the making of this book. My history mentors at The
College of Wooster and The Ohio State University grounded me in the
study of history. ...

Introduction

The examination of the Ohio color line presented in this book is a reflection of the renewed scholarly interest in the study of the
African American past as seen from within statewide perimeters. Black
historical themes in states are the foci of a spate of books and doctoral
dissertations produced since the beginning of the 1990s. ...

Part One: Black Migrants and Wartimes, 1915-1920

Chapter 1. The Great Migration and Its Impact

World War I and wartime black migration were the most powerful events affecting the African American experience in Ohio during
1915–1920. The war set the context for an unparalleled black immigration
to northern cities that changed black demographic characteristics
in Ohio. ...

Chapter 2. The Color Line's Changing Dimensions

The Great Migration of African Americans and the magnification of the Ohio color line occurred in parallel. Racial segregation and
racial discrimination intensified in Ohio during and immediately after
World War I. Residential segregation of African Americans in Ohio
cities increased significantly. ...

Chapter 3. New Organizations and Urban Issues

Social work institutions and civil rights organizations were established during and after World War I to deal with welfare concerns and civil
rights issues that multiplied in Ohio cities during the wartime black
migration. White hostility increased and acts of intolerance spread while
the scale and complexity of the migrants’ needs grew in those years. ...

Part Two: The Twenties and Culminating Trends

Chapter 4. Rising "Black Metropolises"

The urbanization of Ohio’s black population reached a new level in the 1920s. This was the consequence of the black migration to Ohio
cities that began slowly in the nineteenth century, gained momentum
after 1890, accelerated sharply during World War I, and persisted at a high
rate in the 1920s. ...

Chapter 5. Increasing White Tolerance

White intolerance in the United States reached a post–Civil War peak and the Ohio color line became more unyielding and
restrictive in the 1920s. After increasing for decades, intolerance
reached a benchmark high across the nation at mid-decade. ...

Chapter 6. New Leadership and Welfare Work

Black Ohioans in the 1920s persisted in the effort to assist African American newcomers, who were exposed to poverty, substandard
housing conditions, and other kinds of social problems that were characteristic
of life in the neighborhoods of older urban districts, before as
well as after African Americans settled in them. ...

Chapter 7. New Leadership and Equal Rights Struggles

The 1920s presented the greatest challenge to the African American equal rights struggle in Ohio since the nineteenth century. Racial
discrimination and segregation reached new levels as the floodwaters of
white intolerance crested during the twenties, after rising for decades. ...

Chapter 8. Toward Black Political Independence

During the 1920s partisan politics remained an important arena of the African American struggle against the color line in Ohio.
Politics and elections still determined whether office holders were more
or less sympathetic to the principle of equality before the law regardless
of color. ...

Conclusion

This book discusses the changing experiences of Ohio’s black urban communities during 1915–1930, but it is mainly about the color
line. Such studies focusing on the past’s color lines surely can contribute
to understanding of the black experience, but historians must produce
additional works that focus on life within Ohio’s black communities,
rather than on black-white relations; ...

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